Almost Never Seen

The Corvette-powered Gordon-Keeble should have succeeded, but didn't

from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

It's always gratifying to see a sports car arcing through the countryside that really works. Assaults the road as intended, with no alterations to make it more salable at a forthcoming auction. Happily, we see this driving truth a lot. We just never see it when the car in question is one of only 99 built, a luscious grand tourer, and moreover, has direct linkage to one of Great Britain's greatest glories.

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Over the few weeks that coincided with this writing and photography, this gentleman's tourer breezed through a couple of thousand miles, easily, back and forth from upstate New York to urban Boston, blasting along the Mohawk Trail, a classic highway across the summit of the Berkshires. It's a 1964 Gordon-Keeble GK1.
A Whatble-Whatble? How you say? To repeat, a Gordon-Keeble, the lovely product of a short-lived British concern founded by two guys who loved exotic cars and deemed themselves to be worthy constructors of said creations. The resulting car's name may sound like some notion of a tea-and-biscuit interlude, but rest assured, the Gordon-Keeble is strongly significant in several key contexts, including:
Its Bertone lines, the first automobile ever drawn up by Giorgetto Giugiaro in his pre-Ital Design career, at age 21;
Its Chevrolet-based powertrain sourced via the first such offshore transfer of components officially endorsed by General Motors for a foreign-built specialty car;
Its consequential status as an early, notable iteration of a well-used formula, mixing American power, British or European chassis and Italian looks.
Iso stirred up that cocktail in much greater numbers through the Rivolta and Grifo, which also used small-block Chevrolet V-8s, but Gordon-Keeble was in the game first, beginning in 1960. It also made its exit first. We'll discuss that in a moment. Chronology first. It begins in 1958 with John Gordon, who had started building a Bernie Rodger-designed, Triumph TR3-based GT car he called the Peerless, in Slough, 20 miles due west of London. He managed to buy two Chevrolet engines to advance his theory of fitting one into a Peerless chassis.
Soon off the plane from America, Gordon got a ring from Jim Keeble, a guy who lived in Ipswich, built specials himself, and was palling around with a U.S. Air Force pilot stationed at RAF Bentwaters, where jet jockeys trained for one-way missions to Soviet targets during what they casually referred to, not very affectionately, as Round Three or The Big Contingency. The pilot, named Rick Neilson, nonetheless asked Keeble to build him a race-prepped Peerless with Corvette power. He got it, just as Gordon had a falling out with the Peerless directors and quit after around 300 Peerless copies had been built. Rodger, incidentally, continued on, building the erstwhile Peerless under the name Warwick, to the tune of about 40 examples, at least one powered by a Buick aluminum V-8. Another, with Triumph power, placed 16th overall at Le Mans in 1958.
Despite all of this, Gordon had found a reliable, skilled fabricator in Keeble who could bring his dream to life. Although their car collaboration didn't start out as a Gordon-Keeble, it's Keeble who gets the accolades for making it real. Both men actually had the parameters down before they even had a final name for it: Four seats, a space-frame chassis, a lot of off-the-shelf running gear, and a targeted top speed of 140 MPH. Remember, this was 1959. That speed would have nearly won the pole for the first Daytona 500 that same year.
In its earliest true iteration, the Gordon was known as the Gordon GT. The Gordon Automobile Company didn't even exist prior to March 1960. Gordon, the man, had nonetheless already visited the salon in Turin, where Nuccio Bertone agreed to provide a body design in the chosen material, fiberglass. He acquired an investor, British enthusiast George Wansbrough. Keeble, meanwhile, was rushing to construct a running prototype. The Autocar gushed over it in late 1960, declaring, "Its overall character and performance might border on the sensational."
Gordon then had the Gordon GT prototype shipped to Detroit, where he managed to wangle a meeting with GM boss Ed Cole, who enthusiastically agreed to supply up to 1,000 Chevrolet 283-cu.in. V-8s to Gordon. Cole, a brilliant car guy who had just gotten the Corvair into volume production, envisioned the Gordon GT as a GM halo car, long before that term was coined, slotted above the Corvette and shared by all GM dealers.
After all that, and almost as quickly, it all fell apart. Long story short, Gordon ran headlong into repeated difficulty finding both suppliers and factory space. Years went by. Wansbrough and other backers were getting irritable. Renzo Rivolta declined a query about building the Gordon, but shortly thereafter began putting 327 Chevys in big Iso GTs of his own. History repeated itself as Gordon split from Wansbrough. By then, it was late 1963. Wansbrough managed to secure an abandoned airfield structure at Eastleigh, Southampton, the same place where the sacred Supermarine Spitfire, the fighter plane that helped to save England from Nazi bombing, had been produced. Keeble agreed to build the GT there, renamed as the Gordon-Keeble.
Per its chassis number, this 327, 300hp GK1 is the 50th of 99 built (some estimates assert that a 100th car was built from spares, some say 104) once the Gordon-Keeble was finally introduced in early 1964. Conceptually, the car is dynamite, a true high-performance coupe with savory appointments inside. That's a concept everyone from Audi to Volvo would notably exploit in years to come. Gordon-Keeble was gone by 1966, slain by its worst enemy--the decline of British industry, and the impossibility of getting supplier parts reliably. Cars couldn't be delivered as promised. The firm had no sustainable cash flow.
A small, intensely loyal network of fans has maintained interest in this canted-headlamp coupe. Ninety-two Gordon-Keebles survive. Five were in North America, although one of those was recently resold to a British buyer. This 1964 GK1 went the other way. Jeff Roy of Deerfield, Massachusetts, a five-alarm fan of British cars (he once worked for the Lucas Electric distributorship in New England) saw this one offered in a British magazine five years ago.
"I called the gentleman on the phone. He was nicest man, restoring a canal boat, and was short of funds," Jeff said. "We did the deal on the phone. Afterward, he had a flurry of phone calls from England offering considerably more money, and asking him not to sell it out of the country. But he stuck to his guns and sold it to me."
It's not original, and being a high-mileage car is only the start. In 1965, it was walloped by a lumber truck in a sideswipe crash along a Hampshire road. The bodywork fixed, it returned to the road until early 1966, when it was crashed even more heavily after aquaplaning, seriously injuring the original owner. Keeble Cars Ltd., as it was shortly known before expiring, "clipped" the GK1's front, NASCAR style. As delivered to Massachusetts, it wears worn gray plumage and a non-factory cord-and-velour interior in what Jeff calls "French Whorehouse Red."
Still and all, despite two massive prangs and uncertain mileage, the Gordon-Keeble is a marathoner. Part of the reason is that while its construction was necessarily cost-conscious, the ingredients were good: A strongly welded square-tubing frame, drop-forged hubs made by Keeble, Ford Transit van ball joints, and a De Dion rear fashioned around a Salisbury 4SU differential. At 3,150 pounds, it's reasonably light. In England, the late Gordon-Keeble specialist Ernie Knotts removed the Borg Warner T-10 sent over by GM and substituted a five-speed gearbox from a Rover SD1 sedan, a more mannerly match with the Salisbury's 3.31 final drive, plus a Range Rover clutch. This is the first Gordon-Keeble so converted.
"The Gordon-Keeble club purchased all of the spares when they came up for auction after the company was closed. They have quite a good stash," Jeff said. "Certain things are made of unobtanium, like the back window and the bumpers. The taillamp lenses are off a Ferrari 250 GT, so certain things are hard to get. Of the 92 cars that are left, 88 are roadworthy. I believe they've actually got a couple of spare frames."
Operationally, the Chevrolet engine was first topped with a Carter AFB four-barrel, which was accidentally trashed. A replacement Edelbrock wouldn't clear the hood with the dual-snorkel Corvette air cleaner in place. Jeff worked with Summit Racing, whose techs recommended a 650 CFM Holley double-pumper with mechanical secondaries four-barrel snuggled beneath a Cadillac throttle-body injection cover.
Resourceful, very much in keeping with the Gordon-Keeble itself. "Every one of these was an intercontinental cruiser. It sits nicely, handles beautifully, stops terrifically. They don't come up very often. What usually happens is, if someone wants one, they'll contact the club and say, 'Hey, if you know anyone who wants to sell one, let me know.' A lot of times, people will join the club just to make that network of friends with an eye on procuring one."

This article originally appeared in the November, 2010 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.